JavaScriptLandia Community Awards Showcase Creativity, Diversity and Energy

From OpenJS World 2023 – The OpenJS Foundation is celebrating 6 key community leaders, honoring them with our second annual JavaScriptLandia Awards for contributions to education, standards, security and more. Award Winners were recognized at OpenJS World on Wednesday, May 10, and received a plaque and digital badge.

JavaScriptLandia is the home of the OpenJS Foundation’s individual supporter program, where community members can pledge support for OpenJS projects, maintainers, and get more involved in the community while earning badges and other perks.

The nominations for the awards opened in March and were sourced from the broader JavaScript community. Nominations were reviewed by OpenJS Foundation CPC members, board members, and staff and were chosen by consensus.

There are 6 awards available: 

• Unsung Hero
• Leading By Example
• Outstanding Contribution from a New Arrival
• Pathfinder Awards
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Unsung Hero nominees are recognized for their willingness to do things that aren’t high profile, glamorous, or even fun, but are important for a well-functioning project and community. Unsung Heroes often do this work with a smile, even if they aren’t being recognized regularly for their contributions. 

Leading by Example nominees are known for demonstrating leadership qualities in their communities that reflect OpenJS Foundation values, like being humble, helpful and hopeful. Exemplary leaders embody open source in spirit and in practice, and inspire others to do the same.

Outstanding Contribution from a New Arrival nominees are new participants in our project spaces who are making a big difference – from contributing new ideas, new leadership on a project workstream, helping with project operations, to community building and more. These individuals are rising stars who help bring fresh energy to our projects.

Pathfinder Awards nominees are people from across the JavaScript ecosystem who have made significant contributions in key areas for OpenJS, including Education, Standards, and Security. These individuals not only move things forward, they bring people along with them as they go, helping to light the way for all. 

The 2023 JavaScriptLandia Awards recipients are:

Unsung Hero

Richard Lau, Red Hat

Richard has been consistently doing an amazing job taking care of the infrastructure that powers the Node.js project while also contributing to both the TSC and the Release Working Group. His dedication is an inspiration to all collaborators.

Leading by Example

Danielle Adams, AWS

Danielle volunteers her time as a Node.js releaser and TSC member. She is smart, reliable, and always positive in the large undertaking of a Node.js release. She also educates the industry on the Node.js release cycles to better prepare developers around the world, like presenting at NodeConf EU 2022 on The Life and Times of a Node.js Release. Danielle is a champion for underrepresented communities. Last year, she helped lead the Grace Hopper Open Source Day Node.js hackathon, mentoring women and nonbinary developers on their first successful PRs to the Node.js project.

Outstanding Contribution from a New Arrival

Claudio Wunder, HubSpot

Claudio has made significant contributions to the Node.js website and plans to improve the project’s documentation generation to help generate metadata needed for the TypeScript ecosystem. Both of these projects are complex, requiring working with many project members, getting buy-in and doing consistent work. His enthusiasm and determination to move things forward is great to see. Claudio has ramped up and contributed in record time.

Pathfinder Award for Education

Erick Wendel

Erick has done a lot of work to promote Node.js to developers. Erick has done over 115 conference presentations and talks around the world to help developers learn about Node.js. Anything from his YouTube video channel that covers advanced JavaScript to his courses on Node.js Streams to his recent experiments on building the Node.js runtime from scratch to engage developers in a fun way.

Pathfinder Award for Security

Rafael Gonzaga, NearForm

Rafael has made significant contributions to the Alpha-Omega project jointly with the OpenJS Foundation and the OpenSSF and received very positive feedback on his efforts to improve the Node Security ecosystem. His contributions to reports and blogs have generated great visibility from social media, and he has personally trained and brought engineers into the Security Working Group to build the community towards self sufficiency. 

Pathfinder Award for Standards 

Brian Kardell, Igalia

Brian has been instrumental in bringing web developers into standards throughout his career. He has an abiding interest in bettering the future web. He has been dedicated in the past year to MathML and bringing more features to the web platform.